Hosted and Published by: Lamont Jack Pearley
Many Black Academic Scholars are also active practitioners in our respective cultures and traditions. That doesn’t negate their ability to teach, mentor, or share skills and tricks of the trade with the folk. It actually makes them even more qualified. Some feel Black Scholars who are educated or formally trained cannot teach or pass on the folk tradition. I see it differently, and here’s why.
The idea that a Black Practitioner of a roots culture is not qualified because he or she is educated, middle class, or higher, and possibly technically trained makes him or her no less authentic than any other practitioner. Most Black folk that are of communities of practice or represent communities of practice make sure they foreground those that are consider tradition bearers. Honestly, what ever ones ethnicity or folk group is, that is how it works. It is rather turn of the century supremacist ideology to want people of tradition to stay in once place. Culture evolves like everything else, not because it just does, but because people evolve, learn knew things, apply knew solutions and nuances to what’s been passed down.
Black Scholarship is Black Culture and can assist Black Culture. Again, Black Folk are not a monolithic group, so our tradition bearers are neither.
